Bowling Alley

ARTICLES ABOUT BOWLING ALLEY BY DATE - PAGE 4

When Michael, 12, grows up, he wants to be a police officer, so "I can help people get safe," he says. Handsome and likable, he has a variety of interests, including playing basketball, reading, listening to rap music and watching cartoons. He also enjoys challenging his friends at computer games, as well as trying to raise his own scores. Not long ago, he started playing football and already has made a couple of interceptions. He recently visited a bowling alley for the first time and soon was skilled enough to knock down almost all the pins with one ball.

A man was arrested and charged with aggravated assault after police said he threatened troubled Titans cornerback Adam "Pacman" Jones with a knife at a Franklin, Tenn., bowling alley Friday night. Franklin Police Detective Stephanie Cisco told the Tennessean newspaper that Jones was bowling at the Franklin Family Entertainment Center when Clayton Smith, 33, instigated the confrontation, brandishing a small pocket knife. Smith "threatened to beat up Mr. Jones and to use the knife on him," Cisco said.

You can't hear the shots being fired, but surveillance videos released by police yesterday offered a view to what happens when gunfire erupts in a crowded bowling alley. People dash for the doors, a panicked mass on the run for their lives. Parents grab children and flee. Young men dive over counters and crouch. Others duck and squeeze behind video machines for cover. A gunman kneels and peers around the corner. One suspect holds his head where he was grazed by a bullet. Hardly any time passes before a police officer arrives, gun drawn.

The first day of baseball's general managers' meetings produced plenty of action. At the bowling alley. Dressed in flowery bowling shirts, the game's GMs gathered in the lobby of the Naples Grande Resort on their way to a kickoff bowling tournament about noon yesterday. Upon returning a couple of hours later, Phillies GM Pat Gillick reported that he had rolled a 122. He went on to say that Chicago White Sox GM Ken Williams won the event and that St. Louis' Walt Jocketty brought up the rear with a 46. "But he won the World Series," Gillick said.

Buying a fixer-upper is always a leap of faith. But as bold leaps go, it's hard to top Dominic Episcopo's. Two years ago, he picked up an old Fishtown church with 50-foot vaulted ceilings, two-story-high stained-glass windows, and a pipe organ, and embarked on a mission to carve a home and studio out of the crumbling, but still majestic, building. "Some of my friends thought I was out of my mind when I bought it," Episcopo says of the circa-1876 structure, which at 10,000 square feet is about twice the size of the average McMansion.

Ravens linebacker Roderick Green was stabbed early yesterday during a fight at a bowling alley, Baltimore County police said. Green was taken to Sinai Hospital. A Ravens spokesman, Kevin Byrne, told WBFF-TV that Green's injury doesn't appear to be serious. Police said a fight broke out when Green bumped into another bowler. Green tried to break it off and left the bowling alley, but the man came after him and stabbed him in the parking lot. Green ran after being stabbed, and the attacker tried to chase him down but was unable to do so. Police have no suspects in the attack.

I recently told a good friend we were putting our house up for sale. "You have my sympathy," she said. "Showing your house is a nightmare. " We had never sold a house. This house is our first, and we have been here 12 years. Our Realtor told us the house would have to be immaculate during showings. We're not exactly the neatest people in the world. As soon as the kids come home from school, they drop their backpacks, ditch their shoes and socks, and leave a trail of sports equipment from the front door to the refrigerator.

A ban on smoking in all indoor public places in New Jersey except casino floors was passed by an Assembly panel yesterday and appears poised for full Assembly approval Monday. Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey has said that if the Assembly signs off, he will sign the legislation into law. The state Senate has already approved the ban. The casino-floor compromise has angered owners of restaurants, bars and bowling alleys, and they lined up yesterday to tell the Assembly's Health and Human Services Committee that it would hurt or kill their businesses.

It was so quiet, Bryan Bees could hear a pin drop. En route to rolling to a career-best 290 game and 786 series in Cherokee's 3-1 boys' bowling victory over Cherry Hill West on Wednesday, the junior couldn't help but notice the eerie silence. "It was nerve-racking because everything was dead silent," he said. "They even turned off the machines oiling the lanes down one end [of the bowling alley], and everybody was watching me. I'm happy with the score, but I can't help but think back to the one pin that prevented the perfect game.